Well assured that he was not the devil's child, he opened communication with his sources of power, resolute to receive and utter whatever they sent, though it might sound like blasphemy, though it might whiff received ethics down the wind. Through a great part of his prose and verse, there is the peculiar beat and throb which marks work conceived in creative heat, under the sway of the "divine madness." Some of the friends who came closest to him testified to receiving from him not counsel but a sheer access of vital energy exhilarating to the verge of intoxication. It is above all a generative and fecundating impulse that he seeks for himself. It is this above all that he desires to impart to others.
We all tend to slip at times into colorless and meaningless routine, into lives of grey commonplace and insignificance. Emerson seems to have apprehended this as a peril to which our democratic society is peculiarly exposed. He cultivates the means of combating it. He cultivates, for example, the color of Oriental poetry. He follows Hafiz, this Unitarian in revolt against the tedium and dead level of the cold New England virtue, and cries: "Let us be crowned with roses, let us drink wine, and break up the tiresome old roof of heaven into new forms." He writes an essay on "Inspiration," which is a study under ten headings of the technique of exaltation, of ecstasy. He chants an ode to Bacchus, calling for
